Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Her casting, then, was almost circumstantial. During
The Birds
, no one had noticed any signs that the director was obsessed with his leading lady, that Hitchcock had fallen in love with Hedren—any of the preoccupation that has been alleged in the years since. Nor, as is alleged elsewhere, was there any evidence that he treated her with deliberate cruelty during the first film, though she suffered, in scenes calculated for their harshness and terror, just as Lillian Gish had, under D. W. Griffith, riding the ice floes for
Way Down East.
The premiere of
The Birds
was still four months away. Evan Hunter came back from New York to work on
Marnie
until Christmas, when the Hitch-cocks traveled to Paris and St. Moritz, and then Hunter returned to Universal in January and February for additional script conferences.
But Hunter wasn’t the same eager receptacle for Hitchcock’s ideas that he had been on
The Birds.
For one thing, the writer was disturbed by signs of what he considered artistic hubris. Taking his cue from François Truffaut, Hitchcock was now tape-recording all their script sessions, which were sometimes mysteriously attended by other people—Robert Boyle or Tippi Hedren. And the director didn’t begin every meeting by asking Hunter, “Now, what is our story so far?” Now Hitchcock himself told the story, over and over.
But Hunter had been recruited at the very genesis of
The Birds.
He didn’t know that Hitchcock had been pondering
Marnie
for two years, and had already developed a partial continuity with Joseph Stefano. The tape recordings attest that Hitchcock was racing ahead of the scriptwriter, dictating shots for scenes as yet unwritten, which Hunter would have little choice but to write just as the director prescribed.
“The film is going to open with a girl, back view, going to a railroad station at Hartford, Connecticut,” Hitchcock announced at a February production conference. “At present, I don’t know what time of the day we can shoot it because we don’t want it full of crowds because it may cover her up. The essential part is that we follow her back view into the station as she goes to the desk or booking office. … We go close enough to her
to see the color of her hair, and finally she goes on to the platform down toward the train. And we end up with a CLOSE SHOT on a rather bulky handbag under her arm. So that would constitute the first scene.”
But the script sessions were no less prolonged, with Hitchcock’s customary anecdotes and digressions, and one day the increasingly weary Hunter interrupted to ask, “Shouldn’t we get back to discussing
Marnie?
” The director raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
After attending an early screening of
The Birds
, Hunter had quietly seethed over the changes Hitchcock had made to his script without his knowledge or approval, and he continued to seethe even after Hitchcock ordered that Hunter’s screen credit be enlarged from 25 to 50 percent of the size of the title. Hunter wasn’t that easily placated.
Above all, though he professed admiration for Winston Graham’s novel, Hunter couldn’t bring himself to write the scene from the book where Mark Rutland rapes Marnie after their wedding: “There was only the small pilot light shining in from the bathroom. Perhaps that prevented him from seeing the tears starting from my eyes. In the half-dark he tried to show me what love was, but I was stiff with repulsion and horror, and when at last he took me there seemed to come from my lips a cry of defeat that was nothing to do with physical pain.”
It was a key scene for the director, who had spent much of his career fascinated with evil Prince Charmings who kissed sleeping beauties and aroused them to violence and dread—a director who, from
Spellbound
and
The Wrong Man
to
Vertigo
and
Psycho
, had found sex and love at the root of dysfunction. Hitchcock had underlined the scene in the book—and it was critical to his vision of the film.
“When I first read the book,” Hunter recalled, the scene “disturbed me enormously.” Then “when I [first] came to San Francisco to discuss it with Hitch, I told him that the psychological aspects of this woman really interested me, and I thought I could find out some things about that particular syndrome and we’d do something good with it. I said: But it really bothers me, the scene where he rapes her on their wedding night. He said: We’ll talk about it later, don’t worry about it. So I did the first draft and I grappled with that.”
The grappling persisted throughout their story conferences. “Hitch,” Hunter pleaded at another point, “I’m still having trouble with the scene, I don’t understand why you want it in the movie. We’re going to lose all sympathy for the lead character; no guy who claims to love a woman, [and] sees her cowering in the corner, is going to rape her.”
Hitchcock gave Hunter a look: it was
supposed
to be disturbing. With relish, Hitchcock then recounted the scene in crude, excruciating detail, doing “the director’s thing with his hands,” in Hunter’s words, “the way you frame a shot; he brought the camera in on my face that way,” concluding
with, “Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face.”
Whooaa
, thought Hunter.
Returning to New York for the actual writing, Hunter tried to give Hitchcock what he wanted—as well as another option. “I wrote the script two ways,” Hunter recalled, “and I gave it my best shot. I wrote the scene where the camera’s right on her face and he sticks it in her. And I wrote it as well as I know how to write any rapist. But then I wrote it another way, where he comes to her and says: All right, don’t worry, we’ll work this out, whatever it is, we’ll work it out, I love you. That kind of scene. I wrote my scene on white paper within the body of the script. And I wrote the rape scene on yellow paper outside the script.”
Attaching a note to his submission, Hunter said he firmly believed the rape scene was “out of place” in
Marnie
, and hoped Hitchcock would consider his alternative. His script arrived the first week of April; Hitchcock quickly read it, and responded that there was “still a lot of work to be done with it. Unfortunately, I feel that I have gone stale on it, and think it will have to be put aside for a little while until I can decide what to do about it. It may be it needs a fresh mind altogether, and this probably will have to be the next procedure.”
Hunter wrote back, insisting he had done his best to comply with story directives and that he would like to have another try at the script after
The Birds
was released, when both of them could return to the subject refreshed. The writer stated that he would do his “utmost, as always” to complete the
Marnie
project “to our mutual satisfaction.”
On May 1, however, Peggy Robertson called Hunter’s agent to say that his services were no longer required. Hunter believes that he was fired for balking at the rape scene, although Hitchcock never named it as the cause.
And Hunter’s anecdote, with Hitchcock salivating lasciviously as he describes how he intends to film the scene, is never compared to the way the marital rape was actually shot. It’s certainly an unsettling scene, but it offers little of the patent ugliness that Hunter recalls from the script conference with Hitchcock. Photographed with little dialogue, as a progression of virtual close-ups, with Mark’s face closing in fixedly on Marnie’s, the rape scene has a formal beauty as well as an emotional delicacy. Marnie’s expression is obviously traumatized, just as in the book; her eyes glisten with tears; and as she is forced to yield to her husband, the camera lifts up and glides silently away, panning across the cabin walls to rest, finally, on a porthole framing an absolutely flat gray sea.
It was typical of Hitchcock—Evan Hunter couldn’t have known how typical—that he blamed himself for going “stale” on the script, even if they
had gone stale together. Now Hitchcock recognized that he needed a new writer to help him take
Marnie
across the finish line.
As the March release of
The Birds
approached, the director spent much of his time with his publicity team, preparing trailers, teasers, and radio spots for the film. (Hitchcock himself came up with the witty tag line: “
The Birds
Is Coming!”) Hitchcock’s private showing of the film, topped by a dinner at Chasen’s, was held on Saturday, March 2. The New York premiere followed a week later, timed to coincide with a Museum of Modern Art retrospective prompted by American critic Peter Bogdanovich, who had followed Truffaut with his own extensive interviews with Hitchcock, initially for
Esquire.
The Hitchcocks and Tippi Hedren would travel to New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and literally dozens of other interviews were set up by phone: Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Denver, New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Portland, and many more. In May, Hitchcock would escort his leading lady to Cannes, where he had regularly shown his films since the first festival in 1949, and make a red-carpet entrance for the opening night.
Such events were shrewdly incorporated into Hitchcock’s publicity. But although he controlled the promotional campaigns as never before, and the combination of the television series,
Psycho
, and the Truffaut book made him all the more inviting an interview subject for intellectual critics as well as workaday journalists from all over the world, the scope and nature of the publicity was changing.
In the past, he had approached journalists as equals in related fields.
New York Herald Tribune
newspaperman Otis L. Guernsey Jr., who came up with the original idea for
North by Northwest
, met with the director frequently through the 1940s and 1950s, for example, and felt they had a warm, comfortable friendship. They talked easily about any subject, and not just films. Guernsey’s opinions of Hitchcock’s films never entered into their relationship, he said, and if you let him off the hook in a conversation, Hitchcock wouldn’t dwell on his own films.
Ron Miller was an editor of the San Jose State College campus magazine
Lyke
when he sought to interview Hitchcock just before the release of
Psycho.
Later a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Miller recalled that Hitchcock was “far from boastful and, in fact, suggested that many of the innovations he was credited with on screen were not original with him.” Neither Miller nor the student photographer who accompanied him “ever felt he was talking down to us or showboating. I’d say he was actually more modest than vain.” A “good-natured,” even jolly man, “he took time out of his very busy schedule—at the very peak of his career—to sit for an interview with a couple of college journalists. He gave us no ground rules for the interview, no time limits and treated us as if we were distinguished guests.”
After
Psycho
, the press was younger and younger, however, and no longer on any kind of equal footing with him. Like the actors in his films, they were increasingly aware of Hitchcock’s mystique. His move to Universal obliged him to become an even more aggressive salesman for himself. It had been three years since the last Hitchcock film, and the budget for
The Birds
was so astronomical that it was crucial to promote the film to the hilt: Increasingly, the director felt compelled to posture in interviews, especially with the younger journalists. And some of them, without a close relationship or any long view of his career, sharpened their pencils to define Hitchcock according to their own presuppositions.
The most unfortunate example was Hitchcock’s encounter with the well-known Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci at Cannes in 1963. Fallaci missed Hitchcock’s sense of humor, and all his usual talk about sex and chastity and policemen and murderers disgusted her; he seemed nothing more than a swaggering old man. Besides the New Wave of filmmaking, the 1960s also saw the emergence of a blunt New Journalism, which allowed Fallaci to describe Hitchcock physically as never before: “ugly: bloated, purple, a walrus dressed as a man—all that was missing was the mustache. The sweat, copious and oily, was pouring out of all that walrus fat, and he was smoking a dreadfully smelly cigar.”
In the end, the reviews for
The Birds
were generally better overseas (“brilliantly-handled,” said the
Times
of London) than in America. The French fuss (and all of Hitchcock’s carefully orchestrated publicity) may have backfired in the United States—in its Cannes coverage the
New York Times
questioned the “artistic” wisdom of even showing
The Birds
at the festival. The American reviews were surprisingly harsh, with
Newsweek
insisting the horror was “inexpertly handled,”
Time
decrying its “silly plotboiling,” and the
New Yorker
calling the film an outright “sorry failure.” In the
Village Voice
, Andrew Sarris hailed the picture as “a major work of cinematic art,” but his was a lonely voice.
Even though the grosses were respectable (its $5 million in rentals placed it in the top twenty in 1963), the expense of the film ate into the profits; and especially after
Psycho
, Hitchcock and Universal couldn’t help but see it as a disappointment.
During the East Coast publicity swing for
The Birds
, Hitchcock and Robert Boyle also scouted Baltimore, where Marnie is said to have grown up, and Philadelphia, near where the Rutlands live. Tippi Hedren’s briefings for the press tour alternated with costume, hair, and makeup appointments for
Marnie.
The director was very exacting about her look: for the riding scenes, Hedren’s face must be “clean, with shine”; for the death of Forio (the horse), he advised “shadows above and below her eyes.”
On May 29, Jay Presson Allen came to Santa Cruz to meet with Hitchcock for the first time. The important thing happened—they talked and laughed easily—and Allen was signed to write the final script for
Marnie.
A week later, she started work in Los Angeles.
Once again Hitchcock had lighted upon a talented unknown. In 1963, the forty-year-old Allen was something of a late bloomer: she had written an overlooked novel, a handful of television shows, one unproduced play, and another—
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
—that had just been announced for a 1966 opening in London, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Based on a Muriel Spark novel, set in the late 1930s, about the influence of a strong-minded Edinburgh schoolmistress on her pupils,
Brodie
was shown to Hitchcock by one of the New York agencies scrambling to find a successor to Evan Hunter.